Better Births Beyond Mommy Wars

Why, oh why, do discussions in the US–especially discussions that take place on the Internet–pit one side against the other as ferociously as possible? Egalitarian v. complementarian! Republican v. Democrat! Vegan v. Bacon-ist!

(Is that a thing? Because it seems like a thing. I’ve always liked bacon, but then one day I went on Facebook and saw that people were putting bacon in their margaritas and in their cinnamon rolls and stuff. What’s up with that?)

Anyway, discussions about all sorts of things can quickly turn to extremes. One of those extremes is in the area of birth. I will grant that sometimes to change things we need to take extreme measures (BACON IN EVERYTHING) but just as often, or more often, change comes slowly (humanely raised, non-nitrite bacon as a Sunday morning tradition. Or something.)

Those who’ve followed my writing know that one of my interests is better birth: safer motherhood for women in developing countries, more humane, high-touch childbirth for women in high-tech countries. Here’s my latest Huffington Post article on the subject:

Discussions of what is best in maternity care are often polarized as a choice between elective c-sections in high-tech hospitals and unattended home births in bathtubs, dismissed as a “battle zone in the Mommy Wars” or, worse, as a “status symbol” of hipness. But these lines are artificial, having been drawn not by mothers but by midwife-maligning men who believed that women’s wombs were diseased and dangerous, and there are better models, models that don’t pit one “side” against the other. And we don’t even have to look to Sweden or the Netherlands to find them.

We can, for example, look to midwife Ruth Lubic, who used her MacArthur Genius award to found the Family Health and Birth Center in Washington, DC. Lubic attributes the Center’s success — it has outcomes twice as good as DC generally — to their “high touch, low tech” support. Still, she says: “we can’t function [without obstetricians] and really need to be a continuum. Families can’t have the best care without this partnership.”

It’s not a question of who’s “right,” or which “side” you’re on. It’s about finding policies and practices that make it easier to do what’s best for women, which is to say, what’s best for everyone.

{This is the end; click through to read from the beginning.}

Now I’m Grumpy on the Huffington Post, Too!

{here’s the beginning…}

Recently, HuffPost blogger Lisa Turner offered five religiously inspired rules for eating:

1. Eat mindfully, being aware of the food and your body.
2. Eat for the purpose of nourishing your body; treat your body as a temple.
3. Eat only fresh, clean, light foods, avoiding foods that are processed or canned.
4. Eat only what you need, without overeating or binging on food.
5. Eat for the purpose of bettering yourself spiritually.As a set of rules for eating — and living — it’s hard to do better.

I disagree. I think we can do a lot better.

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with lists and rules. Part of me loves to believe that everything — even things as complicated as food and eating and living! — can be simplified down into three or five or seven rules. And part of me knows that rules, even good rules, don’t really help that much.

Who, by now, hasn’t heard No. 4 (don’t overeat) or No. 3 (avoid processed foods)?

It may surprise you to learn that the Bible itself isn’t all that keen on rules, given that so many of the people who claim to love the Bible tend to focus on, well, rules. But even St. Paul admitted that though he knew all the good rules, he couldn’t follow them. Jesus broke one rule after another to prove the point that following God was about loving other people, not getting the rules right, an ethic that’s not new to him but is in fact a theme in the Hebrew Bible.

{continue reading on the Huffington Post religion page–here!}

Health = Morality = Nothing New

I LOVE this article by the Princeton University Classics Professor Brooke Holmes, which appeared in yesterday’s Huffington Post

“The moralization of obesity is all too familiar these days. As America has gotten heavier, blame has become something of a national sport. Yet the ancient roots of Warren’s Plan are a reminder that the association between health and morality is nothing new…”

“…ancient authors are clear-eyed about the relationship between health and wealth. The author of a handbook on diet that was later attributed to Hippocrates imagines two audiences for his advice: people who lack the money and the time to take care of themselves on a regular basis; and people who can afford to devote themselves to their health. When Plato assigned different doctors to the free man and the slave, he was talking about two models of care. The slave’s doctor barks orders like a dictator before rushing off to his next patient. By contrast, the doctors of rich elites take the time to explain to their patients what’s wrong with their bodies. And not everyone was sitting around reading Plutarch. Health, the ancients knew, is a product of leisure, education and quality care.

Read it all here!

{have a great weekend!}